*squints* Is that not a (patoooie!) cupcake cake? Will the poor elephant rip in half, or topple to his death when hungry party-goers finally reach the centre? Will the lion get his own dinner, or be left frozen and hungry in the wasteland of empty cupcake wrappers?

While the Artax reference would make me tear up, my kid wouldn't shed a single tear over this cake. He would think it was like his book - Simba and Nala Help Bomo, where the two lions help a baby elephant that is stuck in the mud get out.

The elephant is drowning in green Jello... uh, very... creative! And, oh look! theres another dying animal under the price tag! (I can't even tell what sort of animal it's supposed to be...) I think the lion really doesn't like green Jello because look! He's eating grass. Strange? No actually. Haven't you seen the south african vegetarian lions? No? Well then your life isn't complete.

Why is it that the rank amateurs know that if you're piping blue gel for a body of water, you MUST make the icing underneath it white, so it doesn't look like the tar pit of death, but the "professionals" (and I use the term loosely) can't figure that out? Or do they just not give a rat's red rump?

When I was about ten, I flooded part of my back yard with a hose until I had an impressive mud pit. Then I sloshed through it for like two hours screaming, "Aaaaaartaaax!" My parents were not amused when they got home.

I kind of like the life lesson in this CCC. The sticker is hiding a gorilla who is watching the elephant's demise. He's not helping the elephant, he may even have engineered the situation, and he hides behind "it's just business."Now pay attention kids because this is what adulthood is: either a gorilla tricks you into killing yourself for his amusement -OR- you destroy an elephant for your own gain.The lion about to eat the gorilla represents the inevitibility of death, regardless of your own success.The circle of life indeed.

So, does the elephant have legs that are smashed down taking up valuable cupcake space? Or is it a legless elephant? Pulling an elephant off a cake only to find it was a quadruple amputee would be the cracking point for me.

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and says, "This is the BEST strawberry I've ever tasted!"

It has nothing to do with the wreck, but I absolutely love that story.

what makes it neverending story? its an elephant, not a horse and its a lion not atreyu. I think its more jungle/tar pits/evolutionary than anything else. it really doesn't make me think of neverending story at all, and I've read that book/seen that movie umpteen times...I think you might just be projecting ; )

Maybe the kid is a huge fan of the La Brea tar pits, and the bakery substituted an elephant for the wooly mammoths and a lion for the sabertooths for a dramatic re-enactment of the tableau at La Brea. Maybe they even rented an asphalt machine to waft the scent of cooking tar through the room for that touch of authenticity. And then they filled a kiddie pool with molasses and made huge sulfurous bubbles slowly bloop to the surface. So lifelife! I don't know about you, but that sounds like one heck of a party to me! (especially the part where the neighborhood brat is pushed, er, falls, into the tar pit and slowly disappears under the surface, never to be seen again.)

Oh poor elephant... Maybe it's just my eyes, but it looks like that reads 'Hoppy Birthday' as well. But that could just be the angle and glare from the plastic case.

Everyone's comments are cracking me up. And I knew there was a reason I have blocked out what happens in NES (I used to watch it a lot and now can't for the life of me remember what happened - probably a good thing!)

Holy crap. The Swamps of Sadness scene in "NES" is still traumatizing all these years later. Still remember the first time I saw it . . . Picture this:Slumber party circa 1986. Four 10 year old girls. A VCR and a movie rental from Blockbuster. After the squealing died down about how cute Atreyu was and how much we all wanted a horse "just like Artex," that damn scene comes on and suddenly we've gone from being an overly-sugared crowd of preteens to a gang of wailing little girls, one of which (not me) went home early because she was so upset.Damn scene still makes me cry to this day.

Actually that ia only Male lions that are part of a pride. lone male lions hunt all the time.

http://www.gtfo.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/join-the-darkside.jpg

Well come to the Light Side we have NORMAL cupcakes!!!!

Let me say that if you didn't cry at the Swamp of Sadness then you aren't human! For all those crying remember Artex is brought back at the end.

And that reminds me....

Rockbiter: "They look like big, good, strong hands. Don't they? I always thought that's what they were. My little friends. The little man with his racing snail, the Nighthob, even the stupid bat. I couldn't hold on to them. The nothing pulled them right out of my hands. I failed."

Atreyu: "No you didn't fail. I'm the one who was chosen to stop the nothing. But I lost the Auryn, I can't find my luck dragon, so I won't be ableto get past the boundaries of Fantasia."

Rockbiter: "Listen, the nothing will be here any minute. I will just sit here and let it take me away too. They look like big, good, strong hands. Don't they?"

Artax is the first thing I thought of when I opened the page. Poor, poor Artax. I was like eight when I first saw that movie and I cried like a baby at that part. this elephant isn't helping the therapy.

Don't know if you're a So You Think You Can Dance watcher, but on Tuesday they had a cake to celebrate their 150th episode....it wasn't a wreck exactly, just the saddest cake ever to appear on prime time television. A big white sheet cake with a printout of their logo (all black) with tiny, black, crappy lettering. EMBARRASSING.

I figured the dead animal under the price tag was a rhino... Killed by the rogue elephant, as they've been doing lately in some parts of Africa. The lion is simply enforcing justice by making sure the elephant pays... At least that's what I saw. :)

My daughter just had a field trip to the La Brea Tar Pits and came back talking about how sad she was that the mommy mastadon got stuck in the tar lake. I think I need to order this cake to cheer her up!

Maybe the person receiving this cake is really interested in the La Brea tar pits in California, where they found all the mammoth and sabertooth tiger skeletons that were preserved in the tar pits? That's actually what I thought of first...though, yeah, the Neverending Story angle does make it way more depressing.

You know, the last time I caught Neverending Story on TV, a thunderstorm was coming in.

During the scene where 'The Nothing' is being described to our hero, the storm warning interrupted the audio for the movie. So we were watching Atreyu stumbling around with The Nothing rumbling and roaring, and... 'de DO WEEP! This is an official thunderstorm warning! Winds up to 30 miles per hour...'

Probably the hardest I've ever laughed in my life. The timing was beyond perfect.

Oh dear! Death is a part of life. That doesn't mean it has to be a part of cake.

The sinking animal/Neverending Story reference made me think of this Doctor Who macro. (spoilers through The Hungry Earth, the first of this season's Silurian episodes.) Let's see someone put that on a cake!

Neverending Story gave my kids nightmares for weeks when they were litte (Artax in the swamp, and that wolf-beast thing...)the little guy with the racing snail is Deep Roy. He was the Oompa Loompa in the Willy Wonka movie with Johnny Depp...I always turn to Cakewrecks for a laugh at the end of a long, long day..

Alright, I'm getting ready to go to bed soon, so I completely believe that the large elephant is playing in a pool of cool water to get away from the heat. The half hidden baby elephant is rolling in the grass. And the lion is separated from them by an electric fence. Yeah, that's what it is. A nice peaceful day at Busch Gardens. (repeat to self while falling asleep)

My first thought was, 'tar pit'. I thought perhaps the wreckerator was going all educational on us and stuff. But then, the elephant would have to be a mastodon and the lion would have to be a saber-tooth cat.

My second thought, on noticing the telltale border of a CCC, was 'patooie!'Although I must say this may be the most artistic effort to hide the cupcakes I have yet seen. The animals and landscaping are even the same scale!

My third thought, on reading the above paragraph, was that 'hide the cupcakes' would be a fun game. Just get some cupcakes, enough frosting to plaster a house, and... we know the rest.

So the story shapes up this way: no Artax, no Swamps of Sadness. Mr. Elephant decided to take a tar bath in a generic jungle setting (any resemblance to any fictional character or setting is entirely coincidental -- nudge-nudge, wink-wink), and the non-hunting male lion stopped by to cheer up the elephant by saying, "Sorry, Dumb-o, I can't do jack to help -- no thumbs. My wife and her friends should be along any minute, though."

By the way, you go, John.

wv: domed. The frosting had to be domed to get the entire industrial-size bowlful on the cupcakes.

Oh not another CCC! That poor elephant looks like it is drowning in dark blue goo. Ick. I wouldn't go near that thing if you paid me lol. Let alone want to eat it. Makes me wonder what exactly were the wreckerators trying to say with this cake? Happy birthday now an animal is gonna die? I fear these wreckerators lol.

it looks to me like someones sad attempt at a cake wrecreation of the scene outside the La Brea Tarpits.

http://www.jeffhandel.com/photo/wildlife/images/(13)%20La%20Brea%20Tar%20Pits.jpg^^ that's it. and i can't believe this is the best pictures i could find. must go back and take better ones. but there are sabertoothed cats stalking the mammoth also, about where the camera man must be standing.

It's an OK La Brea Tar Pits cake, not great but OK. The mammoth sculpture is in the big artificial pond near the Page Museum. The Tar Pits web site shows a lion (I didn't remember there being one) but it looks more like a mountain lion than an African one, so probably therefore no "mane" on the males.

I just found this page a couple days ago, and I'm hooked! I've been wanting to take classes in cake decorating, but I've been putting it off. Now I have some serious motivation: to never make a cake that could end up on here! Lol. I will definitely be a daily reader starting now!

I really can't watch that part of the movie. WAY too depressing. Oddly, I can see bad stuff happen to people, but not to animals. Probably the reason I'm still banned from watching Bambi, Dumbo, or Ol' Yellar. Oh, and I'm 29. :)

@C Lysager - So now, instead of being re-scarred for life remembering Artax, I get to be scarred for life AGAIN by watching this guy with a dead skunk on his head singing a song that for my entire life I was under the impression was sung by a woman.

Okay...While I agree that this is a massive fail, I think it is more of a color fail than anything else. I think the wreckerator used that God-awful transparent blue gel to make the lake, and /failed/ to realize that on top of brown icing it would look...well, like tar. There's even a blue bleed around the perimeter of the lake.Even so, you'd think a person would step back, look at the cake, see a tar pit, and fix it. But if every cake decorator could do that, this site would not exist! :)

Bear in mind, it's a MALE lion; so, technically, should the elephant escape the sticky depths, he might have just enough time to make his getaway before the female lions show up, b*tching about how they always get called just as they're getting in the bath *nods firmly* Ah... or is that genies?

I'm sorry, it shouldn't - but this is totally the post I go to when I need to laugh really really bad. This one, and the post with the tiny lamb riding out Bruce Willis style. They crack me up.Thank you for brightening my dreary day!

Search This Blog

Wreck the Halls

NEW! Pre-Order Today!

Buy the Book

Buy the NYT Bestseller

What's a Wreck?

What's a Wreck?

A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.

order

Where's the book?

We don’t have any copies of Cake Wrecks for sale here, autographed or otherwise. We decided the shipping and handling costs would be too high to make it worth your while. So instead, buy your copies locally or online and then order personalized bookplates: it’s cheaper, easier, and I think even looks a bit nicer.

Ordering Info

Payments must be made through Paypal, which accepts all major credit cards. Sorry, but that means no checks or MOs or barter-based chickens.

We ship everything first class USPS, and will do our best to have your package in the mail within 2 days of your order.